User:Crkcp/Double Fold

Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper is a non-fiction book by Nicholson Baker that was published in April 2001. An excerpt from the book was first included in the July 24, 2000 issue of The New Yorker, under the title "Deadline: The Author's Desperate Bid to Save America's Past." The exhaustively researched book (there are sixty-three pages of endnotes and eighteen pages of references in the paperback edition) details Baker's quest to uncover the fate of thousands of books and newspapers that were replaced and often destroyed during the microfilming boom of the 1980s and '90s.

Overview

The term "double fold" refers to the test used by many librarians and preservation administrators to determine the brittleness and "usabilty" of paper. 2 The test consists of folding down the corner of a page of a book or newspaper, then folding it back in the opposite direction -- one double fold. The action is then repeated until the paper breaks or is about to break. (p. 155). The more folds the page can withstand, the more durable it is. (In the late 1960's, preservation founding father William Barrow was fond of using a machine-run fold tester to back up his claims about the number of endangered books.) This experiment was used by library officials to identify their institution's brittle books, and, in some case, to justify withdrawing items from the shelves and/or replacing them with another format (most often microfilm). Baker's take on the double fold test? "...utter horseshit and craziness. A leaf of a book is a semi-pliant mechanism. It was made for non-acute curves, not for origami." (p. 157).

Double Fold's chapter titles include "Destroying to Preserve," "It Can Be Brutal," "Dingy, Dreary, Dog-Eared and Dead," "Thugs and Pansies," "3.3 Million Books, 358 Million Dollars," and "Absolute Nonsense." Throughout the book, Baker argues -- always passionately and often convincingly -- against the destruction of books and newspapers by the very institutions that, in his mind, should be held responsible for their preservation. He brings to light the tension between preservation and access: which should be the priority? Are libraries responsible for keeping books whole, for retaining books that may be in danger of falling apart, or are they mandated to do whatever is in their power to increase access to their holdings, possibly moving them to other mediums through methods such as microfilm or digitization, and sometimes destroying them in the process? Baker understandably wants it both ways: "Why can't we have the benefits of the new and extravagantly expensive digital copy and keep the convenience and beauty and historical testimony of the original books resting on the shelves, where they've always been, thanks to the sweat equity of our prescient predecessors?" (p. 67).

Libraries in the U.S. destroyed around 975,000 books worth $39 million.

Reviews and Accolades

Double Fold won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction in 2001, and received positive reviews from publications as esteemed as the New York Times, Salon.com, and the New York Review of Books. Even Library Journal gave the book a good review, recommending it for libraries everywhere.

Major themes

Baker targets many established and revered institutions in Double Fold, including the British Library, the Library of Congress, and the New York Public Library. He accuses these libraries, and many others, of neglecting to preserve the world's cultural heritage (through their policies of discarding original materials once they've been microfilmed) and of creating cumbersome barriers to scholarship and research (in the form of tough-to-read and often incomplete microfilm) .

Other targets of Baker's ire include the highly-regarded Brittle Books Program, the U.S. Newspaper Program, the mass deacidification policy practiced by the Library of Congress, and the 1987 film Slow Fires: On the Preservation of the Human Record. (He calls the film "the most successful piece of library propaganda ever created." p. 184)

Baker's issue with microfilming is not so much with the process in and of itself ("there is nothing intrinsically wrong with microfilming...(it) can be extremely useful" p. 25) -- but with the disbinding (sometimes known as "guillotining") and discarding that often went hand-in-hand with the procedure. Baker laments the loss of thousands of volumes of significant 19th and 20th century newspapers: the Brooklyn Eagle, the New York Herald Tribune, the New York World, the Philadelphia Public Ledger, the New York Times,and many others. His other problems with microfilm include cost ("Compared to storing the originals in some big building, microfilming is wildly expensive" p. 26), the poor quality of some of the images ("edge-blurred, dark, gappy, with text cut off of some pages, faded to the point of illegibility on others" p. 14), and the sheer frustration of dealing with the technology ("microfilm is a brain-poaching, gorge-lifting trial to browse" p. 39).

Thoughts about librarians and preservationists

Christened the "Erin Brockovich of the library world" by the New York Times, Baker is not shy about placing blame on the custodians of the nation's heritage and intellect: "The library has gone astray partly because we trusted the librarians so completely." (p. 104). Double Fold was viewed by many as a scathing indictment of librarians and libraries everywhere. The author takes to task many past and present prominent librarians and preservationists, including Verner Clapp, Fremont Rider, Patricia Battin, and Pamela Darling.

Baker displays a particular distaste for library officials who advanced the notion that thousands upon thousands of books and newspapers were on the verge of disentegrating right before our eyes: "...librarians have lied shamelessly about the extent of paper's fragility, and they continue to lie about it" (p. 41). He argues that old books and newspapers -- even those printed on acidic paper -- can survive much longer than many experts predicted, and that librarians who claim otherwise were being alarmist, and were misguided in their attempts to justify getting rid of books deemed unhealthy. (A Preservation Directorate issued by the Library of Congress in May of 2001 painted a different picture, stating that many modern books and newspapers printed on acidic paper were in imminent danger of decay.) Moreover, Baker claims, discarding policies at libraries were frequently the result of increasing pressure on librarians to save space on their shelves, although many were reluctant to admit that space was a critical issue.

Reactions

The publication of Double Fold was met by a flurry of activity in library land. Librarians were quick to defend themselves and their profession, in journal articles and elsewhere, against Baker's accusations. The Association of Research Libraries published a Q&A in response to the book, with questions such as "How accurate are Baker's claims about the durability of paper?" (answer: it depends) and "Should libraries collect and save everything published?" (answer: a fairly resounding "no").

In an editorial titled "Baker's Book Is Half-Baked," published in the May 15th, 2001 issue of Library Journal, Francine Fialkoff starts off by stating "Nicholson Baker doesn't get it" and goes on to say that Baker ignores the fact that libraries serve people, not products: "However admirable his effort to preserve newspapers and books and to ensure that original copies of every publication be retained, he doesn't understand -- and perhaps never will -- that the purpose of libraries is access."

A month later, in the June 1st, 2001 issue of Library Journal, Baker got the chance to respond to librarians in an interview with writer Andrew Richard Albanese. In the interview Baker denies charges of "librarian bashing" and points out that some reviewers of Double Fold had misrepresented his opinions. He says that librarians may be reading these misguided reviews and taking offense without having read the book itself.

Some quotes from the interview:

• "...I do think there have been some librarians who had a different idea of the direction libraries should go. Patricia Battin is one example. In my opinion, she hugely inflated a crisis in order to extract what was essentially disaster relief money from Congress. I don't think she acted with ill intentions, it's just that what she wanted to do resulted in the destruction of things libraries ought to be hanging onto...there were people who acted irresponsibly because they were caught up in the excitement of revolutionizing the distribution of information. And as a result things that we can never get back were destroyed." (p. 103)

• "I wanted to change the way librarians think about some of these collections and the nature of keeping things. I wanted to get the truth on the page so people could begin discussing these issues in an intelligent way. We have to learn what actually happened to these collections, so I wanted to tell the story in great detail of who did what and why. Having told that story, I would like librarians around the country to take seriously what's on their shelves." (p. 104)

• "There's an awful lot of stuff in this book. It is not the kind of fierce attack that it is being portrayed to be by the people who want to defuse it. There is a beleaguered feeling among librarians because people are assuming I'm saying things I'm actually not saying...I'm just trying to tell the history of some mistakes that we ought to be able to learn from as we go into this major phase of digital scanning." (p. 104)

• "There is nothing wrong with taking pictures of any library holding; it's what you do with the thing itself after you're done taking pictures that occupies my attention." (p. 104)

• "I really do love libraries. I want them to be funded. and I want them to have enough money to store what we want them to store and have the kind of invaluable reference services that they have offered in the past." (p. 104)

Later that year, Baker got another chance to respond to librarians when he was invited to speak at the annual American Library Association's conference in San Francisco. He called himself a "library activist" and reiterated the need for libraries to retain last copies, as well as originals.

Richard Cox, a well-respected professor and archivist, was sufficiently taken aback by Double Fold that he chose to respond with a book of his own. Vandals in the Stacks: A Response to Nicholson Baker's Assault on Libraries was published in 2002 and followed Cox's critique of Double Fold that appeared in an internet journal called First Monday. Both the article and the book provide harsh criticisms of Baker's research and findings. Cox admits that Baker is "well-meaning" and that some good could come from an elevation of the public discourse about preservation issues, but he also maintains that "the problems are much more complex than Mr. Baker understands or cares to discuss."

Conclusions

In 1999, Baker took matters into his own hands and founded the American Newspaper Repository in order to save some of the collections being auctioned off by the British Library. A year later he became the owner of thousands of volumes of old newspapers, including various runs of the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Herald Trubune, and the New York World. In May of 2004 the entire collection was moved to Duke University, where it is stored on climate-controlled shelves and looked after by the Rare Books and Special Collections division. As part of the gift agreement between the American Newspaper Repository and Duke, the collection will kept together in perpetuity, and no disbinding or experimental deacidification will be allowed.

Baker makes four recommendations in Double Fold's epilogue: that libraries should be required to publish lists of discarded holdings on their websites, that the Library of Congress should fund a building that will serve as a storage repository for publications and documents not housed on-site, that some U.S. libraries should be designated with saving newspapers in bound form, and that both the U.S. Newspaper and the Brittle Books Programs should be abolished, unless they can promise that all conservation procedures will be non-destructive and that originals will be saved.

Quotes

• "We have...lost intellectual content as a direct result of our massive effort to preserve it." (p. 260)

• "The truth is that certain purificationally destructive transformations of old things into new things seem to excite people -- otherwise polite, educated, law-abiding people -- and it's up to other normally polite people to try to stop them." (p. 54)

• "As a very rough, lowball guess, thrity-nine million dollars' worth of originals left our nation's libraries, thanks to federal largesse. It's as if the National Park Service felled vast wild tracts of pointed firs and replaced them with plastic Christmas trees." (p. 238).

References

• Andrew Richard Albanese, "Double-Edged: Is Nicholson Baker A Friend Of Libraries?" Library Journal, June 1st, 2001.
• Nicholson Baker. (2001). Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper. Vintage Books/Random House. ISBN. 0-375-50444-3.
• Francine Fialkoff, "Baker's Book is Half-Baked: Libraries Are Not Museums," Library Journal, May 15, 2001.
• Dwight Garner, "The Collector," New York Times. April 15, 2001.

External Links

American Newspaper Repository

Association of Research Libraries: Q&A in response to Double Fold

Association of Research Libraries: Talking Points in Response to Nicholson Baker's New Yorker article

The Great Newspaper Caper: Criticism by Richard Cox

The Library of Congress Preservation Directorate

Library Journal review of Double Fold

Remarks at ALA Conference 2001

Salon.com review of Double Fold

Society of American Archivists Review of Vandals in the Stacks